Frameworks in FlexGen Structured RAD - COBOL Structured Architecture

FlexGen Structured RAD
The Structured Architecture for Frameworks

FlexGen Structured RAD is the leading structured architecture for application frameworks—the major advance in application development for maximizing re-use and building well-architectured systems. Organizations use FlexGen Structured RAD to build COBOL-based business systems that are productive and durable assets, and to move their existing COBOL-based systems into a truly open, adaptable and modular architecture for the future.

Frameworks are pre-defined patterns of software components that provide a dependable structure for business systems, accelerating your development process whether you're building host-based, client/server, or Internet-enabled systems. Because of their adaptability and flexibility, FlexGen Structured RAD Frameworks allow developers to achieve future-proofed systems that can easily migrate to new hardware, databases, and other technologies—an ability that's critical for building large-scale, complex business systems that are responsive to change.

Customer sites around the world – in banking, insurance, telecommunications, wholesale, retail, education, government, software and manufacturing – are using FlexGen Structured RAD to build superior business systems. FlexGen Structured RAD combines advanced development tools, application frameworks, and class libraries of reusable components to consistently deliver reuse levels in excess of 95%, unsurpassed by any other business systems development tool or technology.

FlexGen Structured RAD products are backed by a complete range of services and expertise in key areas. FlexGen Structured RAD consultants help with everything from designing the application architecture to developing and implementing an entire application. They help adapt existing systems to emerging hardware and software options, produce flexible future-proofed systems, and deliver quantifiable business benefits on every assignment.

Expert Applications Re-Architecture
FlexGen Structured RAD also offers a proven re-architecture solution that recognises the tremendous value of legacy systems and addresses the need to make those systems more maintainable and adaptive to changing technologies and business requirements. Re-architecture is about analyzing your existing systems, turning what's valuable into reusable modules, and then re-assembling them into a feature-packed new application that is based on the future-proofed structured architecture of FlexGen Structured RAD Frameworks.

Major corporations and software houses have discovered the enormous benefits of FlexGen Structured RAD re-architecture solutions for modernizing their core systems. With re-architecture, they've brought systems to market faster, and made them easier to maintain and more adaptive to change without a complete re-write, and without losing years of investment in Cobol legacy programs.

The Proven Technology
An independent study by QSM Associates of Pittsfield, MA revealed the breakthrough productivity gains achievable even with less focused examples of derivative Frameworks technologies – schedule compression of 70% and cost savings of 84% on a typical project versus industry averages. With the FlexGen focus of Structured Architecture, actual gains can be orders of magnitude greater still. What's more, many FlexGen users have now completed projects they had previously written off as impossible before discovering FlexGen Structured RAD.

FRAMEWORKS in a Structured Architecture
Within any organization, legacy applications will have many similar routines and procedures in common, but these are only rarely implemented in a truly standardized and predictable way. The false reassurance of commonality often disguises the hard truth that, if any changes are to be made without unleashing unpredictable consequences, practically any program in any application has to be approached as unique, uncharted and hostile territory, even though it possibly shares 80 to 90 percent of its features and functions with other programs at the same installation..

It is hardly surprising that amending unreconstituted legacy systems can be difficult and expensive, even when they may have been operating very satisfactorily for years with no prior need for amendment.

With frameworks implemented in a structured architecture, FlexGen Structured RAD provides a uniquely effective answer to the problem of how to accelerate application development. A framework is an architectural model of a specific application element that contains pre-assembled, reusable groups of objects, eliminating the tedious task of assembling them from scratch. FlexGen Structured RAD integrates the automatic assembly of frameworks into cohesive operational applications. FlexGen Structured RAD combines the benefits of packaged software with the flexibility to expand functionality to match a company's unique business needs.

More specifically, frameworks include all aspects of application design that can be standardized. For example, a framework may include all standard components required to deliver a 3-tier client/server model and implements all technical specifics with respect to platforms, operating systems, and communication protocols as well as corporate standards that deal with issues such as security, error handling, and user interfaces.

To create an application, a developer simply selects a framework and specifies the data and functional parameters which tailor that framework to the application. The working prototype is created automatically, quickly, and refined iteratively. Applications automatically inherit an organization's pre-defined standards, and business rules are separated from the technical architecture, making it easier and faster to maintain the application. The result is consistent, high quality applications that are flexible and responsive to change.

FlexGen Structured RAD supports a wide variety of environments and technologies including data maintenance and batch processing and reporting for host-environments; and multi-tier client/server topographies.

THE PRACTICAL APPROACH TO MODERNIZING LEGACY SYSTEMS
Buried in your legacy applications are the data and business rules essential to the continuing operation of your business. You need to be able to extract and re-use these essential elements automatically, re-positioning them in a modular, flexible, and maintainable structure as you move your systems into the future. We call it re-architecture. And it's a solution that works because it solves both business and technology problems by making applications modular, flexible maintainable, secure, and future proof.

Some approaches to re-engineering projects or system rewrites can be cost prohibitive and can result in an equally unmaintainable new application. FlexGen Structured RAD re-architecture provides a cost-effective alternative:– you re-architecture what you already have by reusing the essential elements within a new FlexGen Structured Architecture. The objectives of this strategy are to capitalize on current technologies, better position systems for future changes, and greatly reduce the maintenance burden as these systems are moved forward in the future.

Using FlexGen Legacy Liberator tools, essential elements from the legacy applications are re-architectured into FlexGen Structured Architecture Frameworks, comprising FlexGen $Function frames, data definitions, components extracted from existing applications, FlexGen-supplied components, and other existing corporate components. The legacy system, now re-architectured, tested, and put back into production as a modular system is now maintainable at a fraction of the former levels of cost, people and time.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

1. What exactly is FlexGen Structured RAD?
FlexGen Structured RAD is an established, robust and constantly evolving portfolio of integrated 4GL and 5GE COBOL rapid application development tools that helps applications developers deliver consistently superior business systems and customized software tools rapidly, reliably and to budget.

Easirun (the FlexGen authors) and business partners like Rx Computer are leading providers of application development products that harness the power of software reuse through application frameworks within FlexGen Structured Architecture. Organizations turn to FlexGen Structured RAD for a cost-effective and productive way to build durable business systems.

2. How big is FlexGen?
FlexGen is supplied and supported by approximately 125 full-time permanent staff from offices in Dayton, Johannesburg, Frankfurt, and the UK. International FlexGen business partners extend FlexGen coverage globally.

3. Who uses FlexGen products?
Direct users of FlexGen are primarily software application developers and large and mid-size companies in such wide-ranging industries as manufacturing, distribution, high-tech, retail, banking, and insurance. Indirect users of FlexGen include users of products developed with FlexGen, such as the ADAPT/2000 tool for Y2K compliance of legacy COBOL applications, plus, of course, the innumerable number of companies using package application software that is deployed in a controlled FlexGen runtime environment.

4. What are FlexGen’s strengths?
Key strengths of FlexGen come from maximizing effective software reuse. FlexGen Structured RAD technology can routinely reduce development time by 70% and costs by 84%, compared with any other suitable development technology.

FlexGen Structured RAD delivers an architecture-based approach to building complex business systems using application frameworks within a structured architecture.

The FlexGen Structured RAD approach accelerates development by providing pre-defined patterns of components for applications, built to consistent technical standards. These paradigms revolutionise the way organizations build their core systems, significantly reduce time to market, and transform the practicalities and economics of subsequent application support.

Our FlexGen Structured RAD re-architecture solution gives organizations the ability to facilitate system re-engineering of legacy systems whilst retaining key applications code.

FlexGen Structured RAD-built systems can easily migrate to new hardware, databases, and other technologies.

FlexGen Structured RAD consultants are experts in key areas including project management and leadership, architecture design and development, legacy systems re-architecture, new systems development, and Internet and Intranet development.

5. What products does FlexGen offer?
FlexGen Structured RAD is the leading development environment based upon powerful 'software re-use' technologies to rapidly build business systems that are responsive to change. Proven at customer sites around the world, FlexGen Structured RAD combines application frameworks, advanced development tools, and class libraries of reusable components to deliver reuse levels in excess of 97%. Using this single toolset, developers can re-architecture legacy systems, develop new client/server systems, and transform the effectiveness and bottom-line efficiency of applications support.

FlexGen Structured RAD provides pre-defined application and technical standards that are embedded in a robust, ready to use architectural model of frameworks. These models meet the most demanding application development needs. For instance, FlexGen Structured RAD offers an architecture for multi-layered applications frameworks that partitions the presentation, process, and data layers, and provides the infrastructure to tie them all together. Connectivity frameworks are also available for connecting clients built with PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, or Java to Cobol servers, enabling integration with core business systems and data.

FlexGen Legacy Liberator provides developers with tools to re-architecture legacy systems, by extracting business rules from existing applications and mapping them into a modular, standardized application architecture.

6. What platforms do FlexGen products support?
Developers can design, test, and construct client/server, host-centric, and Internet-enabled applications for a wide range of platforms such as Windows 3.11, Windows 95/98, Windows NT, OS/2, Open VMS, UNIX and derivatives, and MS-DOS. Any databases accessible from COBOL can be used. Event-driven, batch, or on-line programs are supported.

7. How is FlexGen’s technology object oriented?
FlexGen’s technology is object oriented in that all of the data and process associated with an element of a system are captured in a single object called a $Function frame. From a development point of view, all of the characteristics of object oriented development are preserved. FlexGen Structured RAD adds the capability to manage conglomerate component assemblies within a structured architecture. The instantiation of components has been resolved prior to application execution.

8. How do FlexGen $Function frames relate to objects?
A FlexGen $Function frame is analogous to a class definition. At program construction time, the $Function frame is resolved to an instance as defined by the developer. Note that a frame may capture the use of an object as it is seen in a typical OO sense of object, i.e. frames and objects are not mutually exclusive. For example, the push button on your GUI is supported by a single class. You use a $Function frame to capture the code required to interact with that class.

9. What kinds of things go into FlexGen $Function frames?
Any recurring pattern can go into a $Function frame. Some frames will capture the abstraction of typical class definitions, like file I/O. Other frames will capture algorithmic logic like transformation of data types. Some $Function frames capture patterns of combinations of low level frames and in doing so define high level program structures and architectures.

10. What is the difference between construction time and run time?
Construction time is the time during which executable or interpretable modules are constructed. Run time is when the computer invokes application software modules. ‘Re-use’ is a construction-time concept.

"Framing Software Reuse: Lessons from the Real World" by Paul Bassett has suggested that the more dynamic binding we have at run time, the less performance we may get. Binding is the process of assigning values to appropriate variables in a module. When done at run time, this process provides the ability to vary the module’s behaviour. This variability, in turn, can influence functionality and ease-of-use. On the one hand, run-time variability may be at the expense of performance, and excessive variability can actually impair ease-of-use. On the other hand, the binding of variables at construction time limits flexibility at run time.

FlexGen resolves this delicate balance with a clear pre-determined structured architecture.

11. How does FlexGen support team development on a network?
On a network project, all teams using FlexGen Structured RAD can share a single FlexGen Repository of $Function frames, frame sources, architectural structures and standards, and the FlexGen Structured RAD toolset.

Acknowledgement
Much of the terminology and theory explained and refined here in relation to FlexGen Structured Architecture Frameworks is a post-rendition analysis based upon concepts of software frameworks as exposited and published by Netron Inc in relation to their eponymous product that appears to address some of the issues that FlexGen addresses. We thank Netron for their interesting conceptualizations, and encourage them to develop their concepts and products further. With the early pioneering years of computer programming well behind us, most core business and organizational applications now surely deserve a far better structured architecture than hitherto!

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